If you’ve ever heard me speak, you know that I have some strong opinions on things related to social media and what I would call “right sales behavior”. It isn’t that my way is the only way, because of course, it is not. Having sold professionally for close to 30-years, I do have just a bit of experience in this area. There are just some things that salespeople continue to do that drive me a little nuts. Add social media into the mix and well…more stuff to rant about.

My mission (and that of our company) is to help sales leaders and their sales team members bring their “A” game to the evolving world of sales. Though aspects of the sales process remain important…things like identifying and assessing needs, crafting solutions that help your customers improve their business or gaining commitment haven’t changed, other things about the process today have changed.

What’s different?

What has changed is that your buyers buy differently! That means that YOU as sales professionals need your sales A-game to include the smart use of social media as part of your overall sales process. Does it?

On to my rant about the little things…

• Take 30-seconds and personalize your LinkedIn connection invitation. I ignore the “friend” requests…save those for Facebook folks. I also pretty much ignore the generic “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Really, why? Why are we good connections for each other? Why should I have to figure it out? LinkedIn’s policy is that you know the people you connect to, but honestly, I’m open to connect with people I don’t know just yet, but ONLY if you take a minute and let me know who we can help each other. If it isn’t reciprocal, I’m not interested.
• If you want to send me sales spam, could you at least do your homework? Yesterday, I received an email from a Salesforce.com rep asking for 15 minutes of my time to talk to me about the service. Guess what. I’m already a client and have been for several years. Hello?
• Show some respect. If I have explicitly stated on my LinkedIn profile that I don’t want sales pitches, then don’t send them! You only serve to annoy me, and I just tell my net to avoid you like the plague. I don’t care what LinkedIn says about the positive ratio of people willing to respond to your InMail. That only works if you are darn good at personalizing, which most are not, and the person on the other end really needs what you sell. Recruiters this works for but for salespeople, not so much. Respect what people put on their profiles about the type of mails they are open to. Be creative, find another way!
• Stop asking for favors and never offer to do one in return. You have no idea how many people want to “pick my brain” to get FREE information. I’m all for sharing, but too many people cross that line. I’ve learned to be very discerning and say no as needed. But hey, if you buy me an awesome lunch or dinner with a nice bottle of wine, sure I’m open to sharing my valuable expertise. All I ask if that people respect that I do this to earn my living…I can’t give you everything for free! I know people who reach out to me for help with introductions and they NEVER offer to do anything to help me. Don’t even get me started on the people who show up every couple of years looking for help securing a job. Really? You haven’t talked to me in 3 years and the first email since is to send me your resume and ask that I ask my network to help you? Uh…not going to happen.
• Be relevant. Might mean you need to do some homework. I am soooo tired of receiving spam emails that have zip to do with me or my business. It’s lazy and a time waster to shoot out hundreds of email to people that you don’t know and that you haven’t bothered to learn about. Oh, and don’t school me if I have not responded to the sales crap you sent me last month. I didn’t respond because what you offer has nothing to do with me.
• Follow the rules of email marketing. The CANN-SPAM act is very clear…don’t send spam email to people who’ve not opted in to a list. And, you MUST give them an easy way to “opt out”. When you send me email without that option, it really makes me mad. The act says you are “forgiven” if you spam someone once, as long as they can easily opt out. Follow the protocol. In another blog post, maybe I’ll rant about the people selling Opt-In Database services who spam me – I didn’t opt-in to their list – and then give me no way to get off their email. Do you get the concept of opt-in?
• Say, thank you. Is it really that hard to acknowledge people and thank them for mentioning you, sharing your content, tweeting about you, helped you get that introduction, speaking gig or whatever? No, it isn’t. Do it. It is the right thing to do!

Folks, sales is a people business and people buy from people that they know, like and trust. In today’s social world, your prospects also buy from people that their colleagues and friends know, like and trust. Isn’t it time you figured out how to put social selling to work for you in a way that’s focused on what you can give versus what you can get? Relationships matter.

I’d like to suggest that it is time to play a bigger game! Bring it!

As long as I’ve got the subject of time on the brain, I thought I’d write a post about the biggest objection that I hear from salespeople with respect to using social media as part of their sales routine.

“I don’t have time”.

That always gets me a little riled, because it says to me three things. One, they haven’t accepted that social media is as critical to their sales business, as email and smart phones have become. Two, these reps still believe that running around to lots of networking events is what gets them the greatest return on their effort even though, at most of those events, their buyer isn’t even in the room. Three, they don’t understand how to use technology to their advantage.

Adapt or fall further behind.

Whether you like it or not, buyer behavior has changed. Your sales approach needs to change too. Buyers do a significant amount of research online before ever engaging with a salesperson. Can they find you? And, if they do find you, is the information that you’ve shared on your LinkedIn profile (as an example) compelling enough for them to want to talk to you at all?

I know, I know. You never thought we’d do business over email either. Well, you were wrong. You are wrong about social media too! Every day business is being transacted over social sites. Unless you want your competitors to step up and kick your bootie, it’s time to move.

Ok, so let’s talk about those networking events.

When is the last time you carefully evaluated if the events that you are attending is netting you any sort of sales return? In general, you can choose to attend events for two reasons. One, you want the education, because you think the speaker is going to be awesome. Two, you are going to make connections with people who can buy your products and services. Let’s hope that most of you are using your networking time focused on #2. But here’s the problem. Buyers aren’t spending time at networking events like they used to. A friend of mine – he’s the decision maker for the technology providers who get in at his company -  tells me that not only does he not spend much time at networking events anymore, he also doesn’t carry business cards to the ones he does attend. Buyers aren’t showing up, because they are tired of being pitched by sellers. Why are you spending so much time there?

What to do?

Free up some time by cutting out events you know aren’t getting you connected to sales opportunities. Spread that time throughout the week and use it to share content, post updates, research your target list of prospects, etc. using LinkedIn, Focus, InsideView, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, whatever. You can create some serious opportunities working social just 30-minutes a day. I know, because I do it. The key is to have a plan and know exactly what you want to accomplish.

Finally, use technology to your advantage. Unless you enjoy posting on LinkedIn, then jumping over to Twitter or your Facebook page, use Hootsuite as your social media dashboard and content organizer. Hootsuite’s free version lets you connect to five social media sites and/or RSS feeds. Got a blog you like to follow? Curate the content by setting up the blog RSS feed in your Hootsuite account. Every time a new post is published, a message shoots out from your account to your various social media sites. From your Hootsuite dashboard, you can send messages to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and you can monitor the conversations from there as well. And, you have the ability to schedule messages in advance.

So, stop making excuses.

You do have time to integrate social media into your sales activities and like any change to the way that you do things, you have to decide if you will spend time on the activities that actually lead to sales – or not.

Increasing revenue depends on being able to quickly penetrate targeted accounts, get to the right decision maker fast, shrink sales cycles and close business more quickly. The question many sales managers are grappling with is how? And in the urgent rush to move leads into the sales opportunity pipeline, I see a tendency to look to the past and default to “what used to work” when times were better.

What got you here, won’t get you there.

Marshall Goldsmith’s book of the same name, clearly illustrates the pitfalls of thinking that whatever strategies worked in achieving past successes will still work now and into the future. In most cases (maybe in all cases), they don’t.

A case in point…

I know of a very large, highly successful company who sells B2B services to their clients. They sell to the business owner or CEO of mid-sized organizations and their services are designed to improve business performance. Like many companies, revenue has been stagnant or slightly declining, which led to senior management determining that something needed to be done. Their solution? Insist that their salespeople hits the streets to “knock on doors” on a weekly basis. These reps are required to visit at least 25 companies, which is followed by completing a form detailing exactly where they went and who they talked too.

Now I don’t know about you, but I think this is about as lame as it gets. What business owner or CEO is sitting around waiting for a stranger to barge into their office with something to sell?

Doesn’t it strike you as ironic that a company selling business performance improvement solutions is using a 1970′s approach to reaching new prospects?

You might be wondering, as I did, who actually believes this will lead to qualified leads and the right kinds of clients for this company. The answer is that senior management does. These folks are the people who started the company, and in its inception, they used tactics like knocking on doors and cold calling to build the business. Because it worked then, they still believe it works now.

Activity should never be confused with effectiveness.

It isn’t the number of doors that you knock on or the number of people that you talk to that leads to the creation of new sales opportunities. What leads to new opportunities is targeting the right type of client for your business and getting an audience with the person who can make the buying decision. Walking into a business office and talking to the receptionist (because I’m pretty sure the CEO isn’t going to take a meeting with a stranger) is activity and not necessarily an effective sales approach if your goal is to move lead to close fairly quickly.

There are 4 ways to gain access.

In an excellent sales book called “Selling to the C-Suite“, authors Bistritz and Read talk about the 4 ways to gain access into an organization and the decision maker you want to reach. They are:

1. Overt – cold calling and knocking on doors falls here.
2. Sponsor – someone credible in the company sponsors you in the door.
3. Referral – a trusted 3rd party makes an introduction for you.
4. Gatekeeper – you connect with the administrative assistant and hope that building a relationship with her or him will lead to that desired appointment.

“84% of executives say they will take a meeting with someone who has been sponsored into the company.”

Clearly, finding ways to be “sponsored” is the way to go. And, as it turns out, 44% also said that they’d meet with someone who had been referred to them by a trusted, credible source. Why then do so many salespeople remain fixated on using approach #1 and #4 to gain access? I believe the answer is that it is easier and creates a false impression that they are “doing something”, instead of focusing their attention on doing the right something.

Seriously, would you rather close a deal in 60-days or 6-months or more?

In the end, shrinking the sales cycle and closing business more quickly won’t happen with a perceived “quick fix”. Achieving this goal requires a little more leg work on the front-end, and the effort is well worth it!

It’s common in the world of sales to talk about “calling high” in the organization. The idea being that getting to the higher levels means access to bigger budgets, as the execs at the top have the view from the top so to speak. At lower levels of the organization, budgets are smaller and competition can be tight for those dollars. But at the executive level, budgets can be moved around and combined for the right types of opportunities.

This is the new world of social sales where it should be much easier to get to the right decision makers at the right time. So I find it curious that most sales reps still tend to start their sales activities at the lower levels of the company versus getting to the relevant senior executive. I wondered why and decided to ask members of my favorite LinkedIn group - Sales Playbook – this question, “What are the top reasons that most sales people can’t seem to get a foot in the door to the C-Suite?” Reasons like fear, feeling “less than” and inexperience showed up. I happen to like how fellow Sales Playbook member @JerryVoltero summed it up. He said…

1. Lack of preparation to know who the true decision maker is that they should be talking to.

2. They do a lousy job of building rapport with the gatekeeper and don’t give them a strong enough argument for them to be the one who gets to come in and utilize some of that exec’s valuable time. Remember the gatekeeper’s job is to not waste the exec’s time.

3. If you are using a bottom up approach to get there, you have to get your champion to advocate with both the exec and the gatekeeper to get that proverbial foot in the door.

4. And once you get there, you better know what to ask them to figure out whether or not what you are selling will solve the business problem he/she has. Preparation is the key for sure.

And to Jerry’s point #4, preparation is not only key, it is critical! You may have a great product, perhaps even the best in your field, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore preparation. You may have the best product or service, but if you enter the sales process at the wrong time OR you don’t have the buy-in from the relevant senior executive, you have a big problem.

In today’s world of instantaneous access to information there is no excuse for lack of planning. Authors Nicholas Read and Stephen Bistritz remind us that…

“If you don’ take the time to stay current on your customers and prospects, the information won’t pop into your head by itself.” –Selling to the C-Suite.

I think that about sums it up!

Anyone who knows me also knows that I am NOT a fan of cold calling. Perhaps it had its place in sales history, but I wonder. Was it ever truly successful? No one likes the process really. Not the sales people being told by management to do it, or the unsuspecting prospects who are receiving the call. Frankly, I just don’t get why there is still such a large contingent of sales people out there who insist that cold calling is a viable sales approach. So, all I can figure is that they must be selling a product or service that is largely transactional in nature not requiring a lot of buy-in from senior management.

Calling High in the Organization

In enterprise level selling, which requires you to gain access to the relevant senior executive(s) in the organization, cold calling isn’t a smart strategy. Why? The traditional approach is to use a canned product/feature script that you rattle off to everyone you call. Executives aren’t interested. And, invariably you are coming to the party way too late anyway. Do you even know when the senior level executives get involved in the buying process?

Even if you can get the right executive on the phone at the right time in the process, is your call addressing their needs or yours? I think that most of us can agree that typically sales people are focused on their own agenda – getting that appointment or sale. The reality is that executives don’t buy features and benefits.  It isn’t that those things aren’t important, but a senior executive wants to know how what you sell solves their business problems on a much bigger scale. In order to know what problems they are facing, sales people need to do their homework. That’s where social media fits in.

“Executives are increasingly using the Internet to inform their views, but they do not type in the category because early in the process, they’re not educated enough to know where a solution will come from. Instead, they search based on the problem confronting them.” –Selling to the C-Suite.

For the naysayers who believe that social media doesn’t have a place it the world of B2B selling, take note of this quote. Executives ARE using social media to source information about products and services that can solve their problem. Moreover, using tools like LinkedIn can give you incredible leverage during the sales process. Gain competitive advantage by better targeting and qualification, as well as planning for that all important conversation when you connect with the senior executive you have in mind.

To get to the C-Suite, planning and research are key. Have you done yours?